10 Techniques to Writing a More Interesting Piece

Or: “How to Capture the Attention of Your Audience”

Hey, it's me, bloedzuigerbloed! Some of you may be familiar with my

"Improve Your Writing! Tips and Techniques"  and

"Characters: Using them, making them, voicing them" journals. While that (excessively long) journal covered many topics, it's time to add a bit more onto each of those by giving the important ones their own tutorial.

    Ever have that experience where you’ve finished a vignette or story you’re quite proud of, only to re-read it and find it rather… well… boring? Or find yourself with a great concept, but no clue how to make it sound readable? Do you zone out just re-reading your work and have difficulty capturing others’ attention as well? I’m sure you have. We all have. 

It's time to catch your readers' attention!

    I’ve come up with 10 ways that might help you avoid those oh-so-common instances of boredom; to keep the attention of your readers/audience and make your work just a bit more interesting.

If you want to pull readers in, try to…

1. Avoid the “glazed doughnut”

    At all costs. The “glazed doughnut” in this context is not the sugary toroid you might be imagining, but rather an area of text where the audience cannot pay attention and “glazes over.”

    Some instances of this: The author rambling on about minute details that have no effect on the plot, character development, background development, or themes. Or perhaps there are no paragraph breaks on the page and the reader is forced to mow through the whole page in one sitting.

    How to fix this: It’s easy to slip into this in your writing if you have the tendency to ramble during conversation, so every so often take a break from the story to read it out loud. Take a note of when you take on a monotone. Perhaps even ask someone to listen while you read and point out areas where they were getting bored or noticed a monotone in your speech, or request that they read it over and take note of when they started to skim and stop paying attention. Also, adding paragraph breaks makes it easier for readers to see the overall content of the page and pay attention more easily, as well as skip around if they choose to.

2. Stop repeating repeating yourself yourself yourself

    At least don’t do it too often. If you’ve already said it, it’s okay to say it again. After all, repetition is a common literary device for poetry, and often in prose the same themes resurface repeatedly. But directly referencing a subject any more than a few times can be eye-roll inducing (meaning alluding to it occasionally is fine). Your readers might want to shout, “Yes, the protagonist is tall! I already know! You’ve told me 4 times!” or “Why won’t this character shut up about their dead pet tortoise? She just finds every possible way to slip it into conversation!”

    After paragraphs upon paragraphs explaining and re-explaining the same thing, the readers will get annoyed. I know because I have, reading countless books that fail to be mindful of the repetition rule and bore me with pages of the same dribble. So, if while reading your piece you begin to notice the same recurring sentences and facts, be sure to pick and choose the places where you believe these are really necessary and omit the rest.

    How to fix this: Go through and toss out any excessive repetition. (Yes, I know it sounds tedious, but it's worth it.) And chances are, the reason you’re repeating yourself so often is because you want to stress the fact that your character is tall or an orphan or depressed. Instead of mentioning it tons of times, demonstrate it only a few times. Showing it helps get the message across to your viewers more easily than saying it, so you only need to put it in there once or twice. But if it’s still not working, keep in mind whether or not the fact is so imperative to get across to your viewers and so integral to the plot that you need to put it in there in the first place.

3. Never underestimate the practicality of a good thesaurus

    I highly suggest utilizing one. (I linked to an online thesaurus down at the bottom of the page.) But it’s painfully obvious when someone was writing a piece with an online thesaurus open in another tab and they had no idea what they were doing. As a general rule of thumb: don’t use any synonyms you aren’t familiar with. If you do, you might end up misusing one.

4. Vary your subjects & plots

    There’s nothing that draws in the attention of an adventurous reader like an entirely new topic. Try a never-done-before setting with unique characters participating in a plot ridden with unexpected twists and turns. If you want to really suck your readers in, don’t go for the predictable. Be random. (Story randomizer linked at the bottom of the page.)

    Who knows, you might choose a random combination of settings and character personalities that actually  produce a very promising piece of work that you can expand into a published piece. There are plenty of online generators that will combine a random series of plots and characters for you if you’re stuck trying to come up with something.

    This is actually a great exercise to do weekly or even daily. Find an online generator to choose random elements for your story (settings, names, personalities) and use it as a prompt. Write a short snippet about it. Or even a whole story, if you think you can. Just to get the juices flowing. This is useful when suffering from writer’s block as well.

6. More interesting sentence structure

    The sentences we learn to write as little kids are simple, independent ones. “The black cat sat on the mat” is straightforward and simple, with no information other than there is a black cat positioned on top of a mat. To spice up the sentence, it’s important to add a dependent or independent clause the the beginning or end of most sentences.

    If you notice too many simple sentences together in one paragraph or page (or even throughout the whole story), try to modify them with clauses at the beginning or end. This will make it more tolerable for your audience (assuming you audience doesn’t consist of six year olds) to read.

7. Avoid sense neglect

    Sense neglect is when you don’t bother to give three or four out of the five senses a chance. Your descriptions mainly consist of what a character/narrator sees and/or hears, but very rarely mention taste, smell, or touch. You’d notice if you could suddenly not smell or feel anything, wouldn’t your readers notice too? Simulations are most effective when all or most of the senses are activated, so submerge your reader in the story by not neglecting your senses. Embrace them! And use them to your advantage.

8. Vary your names

    I know it sounds like it won’t help much, but it does actually deserve some thought. It’s easy to start skimming through a story instead of actually reading when all the names begin with the same letter, or have the same vowel sounds. If you think you could manage to do that without causing too much harm to come to your story, try it. Perhaps Toby, Tony, and Tracy will be more likely to suck readers into the story and help them absorb it if you make a few edits to their names.

9. Make the dialogue pop

    Nobody (at least nobody I know of) wants to sit and hear someone drone on and on about the same old subject without varying their word choice the tiniest bit. They'll get bored and want to put the book down.

It’s hard to pay attention to, and it gets boring really easily. So try to use attention-catching diction and sentence structure to cast out a little mini fishing rod and reel in a few book lovers. I for one know nothing catches my eye like interesting dialogue.

10. Don’t settle for mediocre

    Just don’t. And this isn’t just a tip for making your writing interesting, it applies to all things you’re interested in doing.
Cooking, research, painting, gymnastics, etc. Remember that if you managed to do it, you can most definitely manage to do it better. So why stop in the middle and say “Meh… it’s good enough”? Not to sound cliche here, but you won’t improve if you don’t push what you think you’re capable of. The most common reason why I find some of my work boring is that I didn’t try hard enough and stopped working because I felt lazy. I know that if I don’t put in my hardest work on a story, it doesn’t deserve half the attention I wanted it to get. It deserves exactly what I put into it. And it gets about that much, too.

There’s no reason why anyone should settle for mediocre and expect everything wonderful to come raining down around them. For some people, success comes quickly because they have connections with the right people, but the best thing you can be known for is what you worked hard on. Don’t stop in the middle. Keep going.

---

RELATED LINKS:
Online story outline/setting generator:
www.seventhsanctum.com/generat…
My “Abstract Vs Concrete” tutorial here on DA:
fav.me/d7vjnsl
Online thesaurus:
www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/…

Thank you to all who took the time to to read this. I hope it was helpful!

Keep writing.